How to Learn Stuff Quickly
joshwcomeau.com
How to Learn Stuff Quickly
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Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly
#2A good summary including many of the common techniques of how to learn something. One of the things I always ask myself at the beginning is why. I might see something that is interesting and get temporarily motivated to do it, but if I stop myself and ask why, I'll often discover I'm just riding someone else's interest.
Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly
#3Overall a pretty good summary of how to teach yourself new skills. I personally went far too much into unguided learning early in my software journey. I took on personal projects that were far too ambitious and floundered with problems that would have been 10x easier if I'd focused on grasping fundamentals.
What's missing in this post is that it entirely focused in isolated learning, away from tutors and other forms of interpersonal teaching. Any approach to learning stuff "quickly" should take seriously Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem. [1]
Partly offloading your learning problem onto an expert tutor trained in master learning has a good chance of vastly exceeding any learning approach a novice can adopt on their own. The internet has thus far failed to support this learning model, I think because it would be incredibly expensive for students.
Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly
#4Overall a pretty good summary of how to teach yourself new skills. I personally went far too much into unguided learning early in my software journey. I took on personal projects that were far too ambitious and floundered with problems that would have been 10x easier if I'd focused on grasping fundamentals. What's missing in this post is that it entirely focused in isolated learning, away from tutors and other forms…
> Partly offloading your learning problem onto an expert tutor trained in master learning has a good chance of vastly exceeding any learning approach a novice can adopt on their own.
How have you implemented this in your own learnings?
Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly
#5Overall a pretty good summary of how to teach yourself new skills. I personally went far too much into unguided learning early in my software journey. I took on personal projects that were far too ambitious and floundered with problems that would have been 10x easier if I'd focused on grasping fundamentals. What's missing in this post is that it entirely focused in isolated learning, away from tutors and other forms…
> Partly offloading your learning problem onto an expert tutor trained in master learning has a good chance of vastly exceeding any learning approach a novice can adopt on their own. How have you implemented this in your own learnings?
maybe some student read this article and forgot to learning from their teachers in university?
Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly
#6Not sure if this qualifies as "quickly" but my best strategy is to put myself into situations that force me to learn the thing I want to learn.
It's the difference between "learn a thing before you commit to doing it" and "commit to doing, and thus learn"
Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly
#7I must say it's worth mentioning that as you build up a library of knowledge and experience in your mind, learning new things become more transitional than exploratory. Picture spoken languages for example. At first it's daunting and most languages have their quirks but overall after a few you find your marks easily.
The effort becomes a memory concern where cheat sheets are how you transition or learn quickly into a new space.
I'm a polyglot in software development. I can work with most tech stack within 2-3 weeks and be efficient within 3-6 months, idiomatic within a year maximum. A big part of that is due to relatability between spaces. Every toilet has a flushing button and every kitchen has a sink and every language had a form of exposing positive or negative response.
My advice is always throw yourself in and swim. Find whatever swimlane or swimming aid available and move forward.
One caveat is learning spaces that are constantly shifting. For example, Swift. What a mess. Look up anything in that language and find 5 ways to do something, 3 expired, 1 manageable and 1 undocumented that works. It's sad but know that that's the outlier, not the average!
Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly
#8What a strange article.
First, there is no need to put pressure on yourself to learn 'quickly' - that's counter productive.
Second, you need to find a good teacher.
Finding good teachers is how you learn 'quickly'. Now the way to do that is to have parents who can help you.
Really, the way to learn 'quickly', is to be born into a family that's loving and competent at life. Then it just happens - by the time you develop the ability and interest in looking around to figure out what's going on, you'll have been in after-school activities and a good school for like 10 years.
There's a bit of an escape hatch - if you're good at academics or sports, you'll get to have secondary father/mother figures and that'll be your chance to catch up. If you don't, you're kind of fucked :)
If you weren't born with loving and competent parents, you'll be floundering through-out life, in relationships, in your career, in lack of self esteem. It's a near guarantee, because whatever short comings your parents had, you'll be solving and then some. That's just how life goes.
Anyhoo :)
Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly
#9I must say it's worth mentioning that as you build up a library of knowledge and experience in your mind, learning new things become more transitional than exploratory. Picture spoken languages for example. At first it's daunting and most languages have their quirks but overall after a few you find your marks easily. The effort becomes a memory concern where cheat sheets are how you transition or learn quickly into a…
I originally started off as an electrical engineer but these days I do backend and more frontend. I’m “full stack” if you will.
I very much agree with you. Eventually most “new” knowledge feels like it’s just really a new “intersection” of a few core concepts that you already know.
Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly
#10Overall a pretty good summary of how to teach yourself new skills. I personally went far too much into unguided learning early in my software journey. I took on personal projects that were far too ambitious and floundered with problems that would have been 10x easier if I'd focused on grasping fundamentals. What's missing in this post is that it entirely focused in isolated learning, away from tutors and other forms…
You need to balance having an expert and not having an expert around. Having an expert around to quickly learn the basics is great, but you will never reach the same level as that expert without learning how to learn on your own. This is the key difference between people at higher levels, there are no experts that can teach you there so it all depends on how good you are at self learning.